Vera

by Stacy Schiff

  Montreux made of them fervent Americans. Véra lost no time in canceling the 1967 Chamonix vacation to protest France’s military withdrawal from NATO. She was perfectly happy to explain her disgust with de Gaulle’s belligerence toward the United States to the Hotel Savoy, which forwarded the letter to Le Figaro, where it appeared in print. She did the same to the real estate agent who had located a Corsican property for the Nabokovs and who was informed in late 1967 that they were doing everything in their power to boycott French goods. “We simply could not buy anything in France or from France at this time!” she explained forcefully. Their patriotism increased the distance between the Nabokovs and many of their Stateside friends. “We are not with you on Viet Nam,” Véra alerted the Bishops, who were of the opinion that the U.S. government was acting abominably. “Perhaps living abroad gives us a different perspective. Nothing could be worse than this war, but we honestly do not see what the President or any one else can do about it. Leave the country and the entire Far East to the Communists? People do not want to see that it is Russia that is fighting against the U.S. in Viet Nam. Without Russia the North would have been beaten ages ago. This is a life and death struggle against Communism, not just a little war somewhere at the other end of the world, alas.” It had long been her conviction that Communists responded only to extreme measures; many of the Americans who visited Montreux—scholars, editors, and journalists, they were almost by definition liberals—felt her to be of the Bomb Hanoi school. (These were what Vladimir referred to as “dumb intellectuals,” of which he counted more than a few among their friends.) The Nabokovs were delighted by the Soviet-Chinese border skirmish in 1969; they would heartily approve a war between those two countries. They were all for Nixon in 1972, convinced that McGovern was “an irresponsible demagogue,” in a position to do infinite harm to America. Nothing quite incited Véra’s wrath as much as the student demonstrations. Most of her anger on this front she directed to Elena Levin who, in Cambridge, was in the thick of events, and whom Véra must have assumed to be of a similar mind; Elena too knew that the Russian Revolution had rumbled first through the universities. Véra was outraged that the Harvard faculty had not been more severe with its protestors. She was all for civil rights, but “hooligans” should be arrested—for good. The 1969 Cornell commencement exercises were led by Morris Bishop, who used his gold-and-silver mace to whack a disrupting protestor in the ribs and off the platform.* From the sidelines, three thousand miles away, Véra cheered.

  She attributed most of America’s troubles to an ill-advised liberalism. “Oh, dear Lena, if only there had never been that ‘progressive education’ fad; if only they hadn’t laughed off the Communist plot to destroy the American educational system and pervert the younger generation, but taken it seriously when they should have; if only Timothy O’Leary had been prosecuted as a criminal,” read one 1969 Levin dispatch. Were the letter not in Russian—and in prerevolutionary orthography—its sentiments would have read very differently. Vladimir had just declined an invitation to return to Cornell; the day after doing so the newspaper had arrived with a photo of student protestors leaving the Ithaca administration building, where they had pressed their demands at gunpoint. “We didn’t regret that we declined,” Véra reported. She was immovable in these convictions, not that she often encountered anyone willing to argue with her. Jason Epstein might have; his New York Review pieces had so offended the Nabokovs that they had removed him from his post as literary trustee.* “We are the senior authorities in judging the Communist utopia, and nobody is going to tell us anything new,” Véra swore to Elena Levin, who all the same remained a more open-minded senior authority. Vladimir too was more subtle in his thinking, but did not entirely live in this world. He routinely asked after the fuss over Wintergate. What had “that Mr. Watergate fellow” done to get himself into such a scrape? As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. saw it, VN simply did not have a political mind at all.

  Véra’s politics continued as ever to color her literary judgments. She responded as would be expected to a bestselling work by a violent black Marxist radical, otherwise known as Soul on Ice: “When I see a cute young woman, a tourist from America, dressed in the latest fashion, sitting on the train and reading (with awe) that rapist Cleaver’s book, I feel compelled to ask her whether she is capable of thinking, capable of thinking at all, and why she is reading that garbage.” Her historical judgments hewed to the same unbending principles. Even the wise Simon Karlinsky could not make her see the merits of Marina Tsvetaeva, one of the greatest poets of the emigration, and for that matter, a woman who had combined marriage, motherhood, and a literary career. Tsvetaeva had been no worse off than the rest of the émigrés and had been as well published as anyone, argued Véra, speaking for both Nabokovs. “In her letters there is a constantly recurring whining note which is not exactly endearing,” she added. More importantly, Tsvetaeva was an artist, and therefore perceptive. How could she not have known, in the cramped quarters in which they lived, that her husband was a Soviet agent? Later Véra cited a more serious offense, when Karlinsky himself began to sound a little tired of the poet:

  Some day, I hope, you will agree with me that she maltreats the Russian language by knocking the words on their little heads with a hammer until she can make them stay in, quite oblivious of their comfort, no matter that here and there a damaged leg or arm may stick out. In Russian poetry Pushkin’s way to treat the words is the kindest, no wonder they sound so happy in his verse.

  Neither Nabokov would brook any criticism of America. “The Germans are usually quite right when they hate Germany,” Véra proclaimed unapologetically, persuaded history was on her side. “The Americans are never right when they hate America.” It was she who conveyed her husband’s disapproval of Gallimard’s cover design for their edition of Pnin, which stood Professor Pnin on an American flag:

  Without being enthusiastic about it [the design], VN does not object to it except for one detail: Being an American he objects to the Stars and Stripes being used as a floor covering or a road surfacing material. He simply finds it in bad taste after all the American-flag-burning and other insults inflicted on the flag by the so-called “protesters.”

  The America Véra so valiantly defended—from their Montreux perch both Nabokovs held it to be the center of the world—had about as much relation to the real America as it did to the America of Ada, in which there is a non-stop Geneva—Phoenix flight. Reports of racial unrest from Anna Feigin, from Sonia, from other correspondents, summoned up a too-familiar set of images. As the Nabokovs saw it, New York was burning. They were afraid to return, claiming that it was too dangerous to do so in the late 1960s. “I keep receiving warnings from friends that under no circumstances should one venture out in the evening alone,” Véra wrote Crespi, who had reported that New York was no longer what it once had been. They remained intently focused on America, plying emissaries for the latest news, the latest scuttlebutt—Was Jason Epstein corrupting American youth? Was the eminent scholar who had visited earlier gay? What was Mr. Pynch-ON like? Was it true about Joyce Maynard and J. D. Salinger?—and yet wholly out of touch with the country, separated by a set of preconceptions formed decades earlier.

  In Switzerland Véra’s sense of propriety functioned as a final moat, after politics and geography. (In the contest with politics, propriety won out. Mason bestowed upon Nabokov a red, white, and blue tie, featuring Uncle Sam. On the inside it said “Fuck Communism.” Véra was not amused.) When Minton visited with the woman who became his second wife, Véra arranged for separate bedrooms for the two at opposite ends of the hotel. She nearly fainted when Irving Lazar, on a Montreux visit, embraced her warmly, addressing her by her first name; the two had corresponded for more than a decade. She was similarly long in recovering from the effrontery of the unknown woman in the hotel elevator who had wished her a good evening. She expected people to know their stations and admired those who did. She made exceptions for those whose devotion to her husband’s work
was so great it presumably clouded their grasp of etiquette or their good taste. “I don’t like your shirts at all,” she advised a biographer, whose style was less formal than hers. He only guffawed. Véra seemed pleased by his nonreaction. She had herself no gift for, nor any inclination toward, ingratiating herself.

  Nor had she any expectation of being understood. She insisted she had no part in the story, no stake in how it was told. This was more a diminished expectation of the world than of herself. She knew well that the transparency was a pose, that some of the most arresting canvases ever painted, seemingly crystalline worlds, are rich in deceptions. Using the husband for whom she was meant to be fronting as cover, she engaged in her own game of hide-andseek. This did not mean she was not there. There is no swelling of pride when Véra noted that her husband would like a particular volume—after the move to Switzerland, this was true of every volume—to carry, as a dedication, “To Véra.” But as Dmitri understood, those two words meant the world to her. She banished herself with the resolve of someone who knows how very present she is. “The more you leave me out, Mr. Boyd, the closer to truth you will be,” Véra insisted. In the course of the same conversation, she conceded, despite Boyd’s taste in shirts and without deigning to elaborate, “I am always there, but well hidden.”

  * One of her early run-ins with Jenni Moulton occurred when she failed to recognize a reproduction of Vermeer’s View of Delft that hung on the Moultons’ Ithaca wall. She refused to believe the work was by Vermeer, who to her mind painted only interiors.

  * Girodias’s take on this persistence: He had worked diligently to give Nabokov the “first real chance of his life,” in exchange for which “I was treated with the most squalid ingratitude by my master, and trampled like a drunken coachman, and whipped to shreds like an impertinent serf.”

  * The recipe for “Eggs a la Nabocoque” begins with directions for submerging two eggs in boiling water. It continues: “Stand over them with a spoon preventing them (they are apt to roll) from knocking against the damned side of the pan. If, however, an egg cracks in the water (now bubbling like mad) and starts to disgorge a cloud of white stuff like a medium at an old-fashioned seance, fish it out and throw it away. Take another and be more careful.”

  * Nabokov thought the Russian language better translated “from” than “into”; his native tongue offered none of the happy, concise equivalents of English, and was particularly unaccommodating of technical terms. “Windshield wipers,” he complained after the Lolita experience, could be rendered either in a forty-letter phrase or by a series of vulgar Sovietisms.

  † The book nearly bankrupted the small American publisher who took it on in 1967, and who appeared to speak publishing as a second language. He failed to endear himself to the Nabokovs for many reasons, not least because he continually lobbed the epistolary ball over Véra’s head, after having been instructed numerous times, over the course of years, that that was not how the game was played.

  * To the small American firm that published The Eye in paperback Véra explained her husband’s position. “He wants me to forewarn you that there will be many reviews, and some are sure to be vicious, since my husband has many enemies. He asks you not to let this disturb you. Vicious reviews sometimes do more for the book than bland praise.”

  * The situation was reminiscent of the wail emitted by that creative reader of train timetables, Timofey Pnin: “I was thinking I gained twelve minutes, and now I have lost nearly two whole hours.”

  * Few made it past the impeccable Palace concierge, Carlo Barozzi, before whose desk a great number of distinguished knees trembled. Barozzi saw to it that no one knew the Nabokovs’ room number; that the phone messages piled up at the switchboard; that the telexes made their way upstairs only when welcome.

  * Together the two blurred into one animated ball. “I rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him, we rolled over us,” Nabokov had written in Lolita.

  * It was enough to induce journalists to leave their tape recorders running after the sanctioned interview had ended, as did two intrepid souls, making pleasant conversation with the Nabokovs while praying that the flap-flap-flap of a tape reaching its end would not betray them.

  * Encouraged by her enthusiasm and out of admiration for VN, White began to visualize Véra as his muse. When he formulated his definition of his ideal reader—“a cultivated heterosexual woman in her sixties who knows English perfectly but is not an American”—it was Véra he had in mind.

  * The invective was nearly formulaic. Occasionally Véra took it a step further, as she did when Case Western University informed Nabokov they were considering him as a candidate for a 1973 visiting scholar position. Could he travel to Cleveland, at their expense, to interview? Véra replied that her husband did not plan to be in the United States in 1973. “And in any case in Mr. Nabokov’s opinion, he is sufficiently known for his work to make a preliminary meeting superfluous, and a 14,000-mile round trip for this purpose absurd, whether you pay or do not pay his travelling expenses.”

  * A quarter of a million dollars in 1967 was the equivalent of $1,250,000 in 1999 dollars.

  * The discussions did not prevent the Nabokovs from receiving a mid-November visit from Harper publisher Cass Canfield, who attempted over lunch to lure Vladimir to his firm with a generous and creative offer. Confidentially, Véra asked Iseman if, in good faith, such a proposal could be used as a negotiating tool with McGraw-Hill. She does not appear to have done so, but can only have felt more confident in her dealings with the Harper offer in her back pocket. She wisely waited until the day after the McGraw-Hill contract was sealed to send her regrets to Canfield, noting that “VN was practically committed at the time you arrived in Montreux.”

  * The right author was by definition a European-based one, for whom a fixed amount of salary income was exempt from tax.

  * The process resembled Nabokov’s description of reading from his lecturing days: “Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart, squashed—then its lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the palm, it will be munched and rolled upon the tongue with relish; then, and only then, its rare flavor will be appreciated at its true worth and the broken and crushed parts will again come together in your mind and disclose the beauty of a unity to which you have contributed something of your own blood.”

  * A Cornell professor, Matthew Hodgart had surely heard something of the Nabokov marriage.

  * Some preferred the more impressionistic volume. Updike felt the new version of Nabokov’s past paled in comparison to the old version of his past; to his mind the corrected sentences hobbled “under their new loads of accuracy.”

  * She adopted the same strategy later with Field, when it came to the Guadanini affair. “I would rather keep this out of the book, mainly because I know VN would not want it published. As for me, I do not really care whether it will be published or not.”

  * Don’t be angry with the rain, her husband had begged in 1926; it simply does not know how to fall upward.

  * Karlinksy was an especially welcome visitor. In January 1969, he nominated VN for the Nobel Prize, as he would again, an honor VN decidedly coveted. “Even if Borges and I split it, it would still amount to $500,000,” he reminded one visitor.

  * Vladimir had a less-favorite sister too. He supported but had no interest in meeting his sister Olga, who was living in Prague during these years, and whom he had not seen since 1937.

  * Véra had been at the other side of the table. “What did you say to Vladimir last night?” she phoned Crespi to ask the next morning; suddenly her husband was writing in a white heat. While composing Ada Vladimir examined Crespi’s teenaged son about his sexual activities. A budding poet, Marcantonio Crespi quizzed him back about verse and meter; Vladimir kept returning the conversation to the lower ground. He had to do his research somewhere.

  * It fell to Crespi to tell Nabokov that Charlie Chaplin should like to meet him, an invitation VN had no trouble resisting.
“A man of Chaplin’s talent and intelligence can not be excused his politics,” he thundered. The two comedians, great admirers of each other’s work, neighbors for years, never met. Nor did the Nabokovs meet another neighbor on the hill, Noel Coward, who had claimed never to have been able to finish Lolita.

  * To the press Bishop explained that the mace was a medieval weapon: “Richard the Lion Hearted always had one by his side. I merely put it to the use for which it was intended.” To his daughter he sounded a more poignant note regarding his heroics: “I thus achieved in a few seconds more fame than I have earned in 77 years of sober academic output.”

  * He was replaced by William McGuire, about whose politics the couple fortunately never inquired. They were indistinguishable from Epstein’s, but McGuire did not broadcast his position in a national journal.

  10

  THE LAND BEYOND THE VEIL

  He lies like an eyewitness. —RUSSIAN SAYING

  1

  As her seventieth birthday approached, Véra had the distinct sense that time—the medium outside of which she allowed her husband to live, so that he might tame, cheat, abolish, deny it in his art—had suddenly accelerated. There were so many new editions of his work that she had lost track; she could not answer the question when Lazar asked if Despair had been published in paperback. Two days after Christmas 1971, she mailed Andrew Field her corrections to the bibliography he was preparing: “I apologize for this disjointed bit of work. I cannot convey to you the atmosphere of incessant interruptions in which I have to work, the condition of my desk flooded with unanswered and half-answered mail etc. etc.” All her holidays were now busman’s holidays. It was fortunate that, as Dmitri observed, “her attention span for pure amusement was quite limited.” The industrious Goldenweiser professed envy of her “phenomenal capacity for work.” Nabokov said that his pencils outlasted his erasers but Véra’s were sorry little two-inch stubs, worn down to the ferrules, keeling under the weight of their add-on erasers.